Fred Aiken Writing

Category: Short Story

March 3, 2023

The Lawn; Or A Story About a Guy’s Lawn and How He Becomes One With It

The grass is dewy. It feels like bouncing on an air bubble or in a novelty bounce house. Kentucky bluegrass. A soft pine smell wafts through the air. His head fills with purple prose and romantic ideals.

Luther tops up his mower with a hefty slug of petrol before starting it up. 4.5 horsepower. A 23 inch blade that he had just sharpened last week. A cherry red finish that had faded and needed to be repainted. But that was a

The task of mowing the lawn was his weekly spiritual ritual that initiated the weekend’s tranquil start. His wife, Alicia, offered to buy him an automatic riding mower with a much higher capacity to mow the lawn a few years back, but he refused. He told her that he enjoyed the mower he had. He told her that it helped him commune with God, though he never seemed to hear any divine voice with the whir of the engine going.

If that’s the case, she said, then wouldn’t you just want a manual lawn mower.

And perhaps if Luther were younger, leaner, filled with more gumption and energy, then he might have said yeah, sure, he would enjoy a manual lawn mower despite it probably taking twice, if not three times, longer to cut the lawn. But he was getting up there in age. His joints distilled low energy into an arthritic happiness.

The mist of the soft orange sun peaks over the horizon to greet him. A wild mushroom of clouds sprouts wildly miles above him. Luther takes a deep breath in. He gets a hefty waft of petrichor. The ozone begins to crush his lungs, and the bubble in his throat begins to burst.

He falls to the ground. Gripped by entropy. Luther melds into the infinity of his lawn.

March 3, 2023

Blank Trading Cards of Future Events Left Unwritten and Un-contemplated

Droning electronic noises. Indigestion. Mechanical thoughts. Mechanical meanderings mumbling passively pass puritanical purpose.

Odd sensation. Sparks. Coarse edges of adrenaline. A continuous drip speeding up.

The next page. Blank.

Follow up.

Fiery explosions. Death stare. Moribund snacks on the table. Left stale. Hopelessly romantic.

March 1, 2023

What it Might Look Like to be a Grill Master Before Dawn

2am.

I don’t trust the time. I don’t trust anything that tells me who and what I am at any particular juncture in my life.

The strobe lights of consumerism whiz through the room. I scroll through Amazon. Window shopping, of a sorts. I’ve been at this since 8pm the previous night.

In 2 hours I will need to be at work. I work as a welder for a steel company that employs almost a third of this town. This godforesaken town. Nah, it’s not that bad.

I honestly have no idea why I constantly scroll and scour the internet, especially Amazon. Mostly Amazon. I spend about 5hrs on average per day looking at a wide-range of products on Amazon that I have no intention of buying. It’s not that I couldn’t afford them. I have a fairly decent-paying, union job and no dependents in my mid-20’s. I’m certain I’m the ideal demographic for most retail companies wanting to peddle their crap to some unsuspecting turd.

I might just be that turd.

But I end up never buying anything. I guess I like the idea of buying crap more than actually dealing with that crap. It’s more romantic that way. Scrolling through Amazon, imagining what my life would look like if I had an Oklahoma Joe meat cleaver with accompanying holster. Maybe I could be a butcher. Perhaps I could be the type of guy that would grill out every weekend and make my friends and neighbors green with envy from the rich aromas billowing from my backyard’s grill. Which of course would also mean that I would need a grillin’ apron that had some clever catchphrase printed on the front, like The Grillfather, or Chillin’ to be Grillin’, or Grillin’ Singer, or How’s it Cookin’, Good Lookin’. I don’t know what apron I would actually buy. I’ve envisioned myself with almost over 300 different grill aprons, and I still honestly couldn’t say which one looked better on me in my mind.

A jolting buzz rings across the room. My phone’s alarm notifies me that I need to be up, to be alive, so I can go to work. I briefly contemplate calling out so I can scroll through Amazon some more, but quickly scrap the idea because if I didn’t have any income then I wouldn’t be able to imagine my life better with all the stuff on Amazon.